Greenwashing Thatcher's history does an injustice both to her and to science and technology policy

We've been running a series of essays on scientific advice recently (e.g. yesterday's piece by Shelia Jasanoff). It's on a break today, but here's something on a related issue.

Margaret Thatcher is often celebrated for her leadership on the issue of climate change. Read, if you haven't already, her 1989 speech to the UN for example. Or the 1988 one to the Royal Society. Or to the 2nd World Climate Conference in 1990. You might be surprised.

The image of Thatcher the global environmental leader jars with some of the patterns of right wing politics we are more familiar with today. Indeed, it suits particular ends of environmentalism to wave this particularly green-tinged blue card around. But Thatcher has long been a flexible cultural image, and in recent years was occasionally used as an icon for climate sceptics too. See, for example, these June 2010 pieces by Lord Monckton writing for the Watts up With That blog and Christopher Booker in the Telegraph.

The official watchdog that advises the Government on greenhouse gas emissions targets has launched an astonishing attack on The Mail on Sunday – for accurately reporting that alarming predictions of global warming are wrong.

We disclosed that although highly influential computer models are still estimating huge rises in world temperatures, there has been no statistically significant increase for more than 16 years.

Despite our revelation earlier this month, backed up by a scientifically researched graph, the Committee on Climate Change still clings to flawed predictions.

In this article on his “WattsUpWithThat” (WUWT) website, Anthony Watts alleges that Principia Scientific International (PSI) whom he “truly dislikes giving any attention to” has done some “really bad mangling” and “completely misread the NASA study.” Sadly, for Mr. Watts his readership don't agree with him. Comments on WUWT are currently running two to one in favour of PSI.

He points out patronisingly (as if we hadn't noticed) that the NASA article was only talking about the thermosphere. Yet what does the PSI article repeatedly refer to? “Earth's upper atmosphere” and “the thermosphere.”

And what does PSI deduce? “Greenhouse gases actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays.” Clearly we are only talking about the very harmful high intensity rays, such as those in a “burst of solar activity” early in March which NASA said delivered “26 billion kilowatt hours of energy from the Sun.” Obviously members of PSI know that the total percentage of Solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere and clouds is somewhere between 19% (as shown in the NASA diagram below) and the 33% calculated for moist cloudy regions in this paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Furthermore, when carbon dioxide absorbs such incident radiation, much of it is in the 2.7 micron band, for which each photon carries nearly four times the energy of typical 10 micron photons emitted from Earth's surface. Notice also that the NASA diagram shows only 15% being absorbed by the atmosphere from upwelling radiation, so more is absorbed from incident radiation. That alone would appear to imply a net cooling effect for radiating molecules.

Oh, the The Mail on Sunday. Is there no limit to your denial of climate change?

The Mail on Sunday is a sister publication of the UK tabloid Daily Mail, and has a history of running ridiculously misleading claims downplaying the reality of climate change. Probably the worst offender is David Rose, who has been constantly hammering the idea—despite all the evidence against it—that the Earth has not been getting warmer for the past 16 years. To make this claim he has to egregiously cherry-pick his data, choosing where to look on a graph of temperatures to make it look like warming has slowed.

I’ve shown just how Rose is so fast and loose with reality in previous posts, when he first came to my attention for claiming warming had stopped (and then tried to show that the Sun’s lack of activity would cool the Earth, a claim for which there is essentially no good evidence), and then again when he posted a graph so wrong it would mean getting an F in ninth-grade math. You can also read debunkings of Rose’s ridiculosities from the UK Met Office, the national weather service for the United Kingdom, which regularly has to issue articles debunking the nonsense posted in The Mail.

Piers Corbyn says: "Prof Joanna Haigh, head of Physics of Imperial College and a leading Bishop of the CO2 warmistas religion, has made misleading statememts in the Telegraph (link below) which are easily refutable by any student in Imperial College Physics1.

One might find it curious (but I don't) that she finds the time to attack a politician for seeking a more open approach on the issue yet was unable to find the time to walk 100 yards to actually debate by invitation the matters at our WeatherAction - Climate Realists conference which included international speakers by video links and was attended by the BBC, in Imperial College October 2009 (the first Climate Fools Day event).

In The Telegraph she misleadingly implies Boris Johnson believes in a direct correspondence between solar activity amounts and London weather and then says he should be wary of drawing such conclusions - which he has never drawn. [There is of course a complex yet predictable relationship between modulated solar activity and weather patterns]. She knows and Telegraph readers (whom she takes for stupid) know that Boris made it clear he cannot comment on science details but has seen WeatherAction forecasts, which he receives on a regular basis, succeed again and again and again and is simply saying WeatherAction should be listened to, especially because of the economic implications of any coming mini ice age.

WeatherAction being listened to is the Co2 warmistas great fear because it would bring in a new age of enlightenment of evidence-based science and poltics and would end the corruption of science expressed by the stranglehold of CO2 warmistas on UK schools and academia from year one in Primary schools to the Royal Society (a door upon which Prof Haigh is knocking).

SIR – As a professor of atmospheric physics, at Imperial College London, I’m delighted that Boris Johnson maintains his interest in weather and climate (“It’s snowing, and it really feels like the start of a mini ice age”, Comment, January 21), but he should be wary of drawing generalised conclusions from his observations. He suggests that the cold weather is due to declining solar activity – but the sun is more active now than it has been since 2009, and about the same as it was in 2004 and 1998. What we have is the lovely variability of British weather sitting on top of a long-term global average warming due to greenhouse gas increases. This is not an issue of opinion, but one of basic physics.

Today, Sir David Attenborough remarkably said that "humans are a plague on the earth" (http://bit.ly/10NotMj). He should have done a bit of fact checking first.

Sounding like this is the year 1800 and he just picked up a copy of Malthus, he predicts we're going to run out of resources, starvation will increase and we're simply running out of space.

Well, most of our resources are getting more plentiful, not less because of innovation (see my Foreign Affairs piece http://fam.ag/LfIoMl).

Starvation, though still a huge issues, has actually declined dramatically: in 1950, 53% of all people in the developing world starved, whereas it has dropped to about 13% today. (Remember, a significant part of the reason for higher food prices and more hunger is that we grow biofuels on an area one-quarter of France.)

Attenborough’s claim that humanity is a plague is silly and dangerous. When natural historians use their knowledge to try to explain the human, social world and its problems, it’s almost always dangerously wrong. It is presented as a ‘scientific’, empirical approach, but is deeply ideological.

The Telegraph’s resident Gaia-botherer, Louise Gray has a short piece on neoMalthusian anti-baby campaigner, David Attenborough.

The television presenter said that humans are threatening their own existence and that of other species by using up the world’s resources. He said the only way to save the planet from famine and species extinction is to limit human population growth.

“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,” he told the Radio Times. Sir David, who is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, has spoken out before about the “frightening explosion in human numbers” and the need for investment in sex education and other voluntary means of limiting population in developing countries. “We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves — and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.”

Our old friend the Telegraph blogger, one-trick wind farm whinger and Prospective Parliamentary less-than-entirely-Candidate for Corby, the far-Right-but-less-than-entirely-Honourable James Delingpole, has an article in the Mail.

The content is, at first glance, the same as his blogs, with the usual list of misrepresentations and fabrications, but this itself is misleading. This piece actually represents a complete reversal of James’s most deeply held beliefs. Whilst there was no obvious difference in his political opinions – climate change is a Marxist conspiracy organised by the Met Office on behalf of the BBC – there is a far more fundamental revision happening.

He still believes that Greenpeace is actually a long-term KGB sleeper cell dedicated to bringing about the new, communist world order. Billionaire climatologists are still sucking the national economy dry with their relentless and fraudulent demands for research grants, just as wind turbines suck electricity out of the national grid and are the greatest crime against humanity since the flood. (The original flood, that is – the recent floods were invented by the Met Office as part of their evil plot, and in fact ‘there has been nothing particularly abnormal about the recent rain’ as there were ‘two years, 1872 and 1768, wetter than the supposed record-breaking year of 2012’. In fact, the Met Office figures show that 2000 was wetter than 2012, but James is trying to prove that the UK is not getting wetter, and so ignores the actual record-breaking year due to its inconveniently recent occurrence). ‘Scientists’, environmentalists and most of all the shadowy power behind the throne, the BBC, remain the true face of evil in the world.